The Goodie Mob reunion is a peculiar one. Once a dominating force in Atlanta’s Dungeon Family collective (which also included OutKast, Killer Mike and more), the rap quartet hasn’t recorded together in full since 1999’s World Party, a flirtation with pop sensibilities so out of step with the down-home grooves of well-received early albums Soul Food and Still Standing that it reportedly motivated one of the members to leave the group. That defector, one Cee-Lo Green, spent the intervening years in hot pursuit of mainstream success, an effort that took him from the accomplished backwoods soul-rap fusion of 2002’s Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections through left-field smashes with producer Danger Mouse in Gnarls Barkley ("Crazy") and as a solo artist for 2010’s near-ubiquitous novelty hit “Fuck You”. (More recently Cee-Lo has worked as a judge on the NBC singing contest "The Voice.") Nowadays Cee-Lo’s a soul singer with the juice to push almost 200,000 units of a Christmas album with guest appearances from Christina Aguilera and the Muppets. It’s quite possible that a good portion of his new fanbase has no idea that he raps.
Getting the band back together seems counterintuitive to Cee-Lo’s career trajectory, but it maybe makes sense for the rest of the group. Goodie Mob reformed as a trio for 2004’s pithily titled One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show but quickly disintegrated after it bombed. In that sense, the reunited foursome’s just-released Age Against the Machine mirrors the Jacksons’ post-Thriller reunion album Victory, whose primary purpose, it seemed, was to filter the breakout success of Michael back through the rest of the family. Age Against the Machine’s got great songs, but it’s jerky and frustratingly beholden to the whims of its cash cow. Where previous group efforts were borne out of what appeared to be a democratic songwriting process, quite a few of the songs here are essentially glorified Cee-Lo solo cuts. It works for the race conscious pop nugget “Power” (formerly “White Power”) and the blistering state of hip-hop address “Nexperiance”, an update on Still Standing’s “The Experience”. But we also get the kitschy “Amy” (Actual lyric: “My very first white girl/ Golly gee she sure was fine”) and overwrought productions like “Come as You Are” and “Ghost of Gloria Goodchild”.
Age Against the Machine functions best when it’s not reaching. Brass tacks rap cuts like “Vallelujah” win for dispensing with the gimmicky pop-soul of the Cee-Lo tracks. When “Pinstripes” lobs shots at Atlanta’s trap elite and “Special Education” suggests that “V.I.P. stands for ‘very insecure people,’” Goodie Mob begins to tiptoe back into the brusque, mystical conscious rap of the Dungeon Family’s heyday. The group sounds energized on these numbers, doling out hard-fought wisdom over the gritty electronic bounce of Age Against the Machine’s production like seasoned veterans. Cee-Lo proves his rap skills haven’t tarnished as well; he matches wits with T.I. on “Pinstripes” and fires off streetwise darts like “I’m still street, and I kill to eat/ The life of a nigga is still cheap” and “I’m a ‘caine baker and a rainmaker and a chain taker and a brain breaker” with an aplomb that belies his years-long leave of absence from rap. A few more songs like these, and this thing would’ve been a barn burner.
The album falters in spots because of the disparity of its urges. Age Against the Machine seems to want to ease Cee-Lo back into the Goodie Mob’s world while not-so-gently tugging them into his. But the true Goodie Mob reunion effort and the experimental Cee-Lo rap project vying for control here don’t jibe particularly well with one another, a disconnect that’s further exacerbated by a glut of interstitial skits tasked with maneuvering in and out of the album’s sharp turns. The more traditional Goodie Mob tracks lean into Age Against the Machine’s sense of occasion; both in title and in content, the album presents itself as a righteous rejoinder to the moral bankruptcy of Atlanta trap from a cadre of the city’s elder statesmen. But as soon as that mood is established, a Cee-Lo song drops by and dashes it to bits. “The prodigal son has returned,” as Dungeon Family spoken word artist Big Rube says on opener “U Don’t Know What You Got”. He’s back, but he’s taken over the house and filled it with showy Broadway pomp.
